This Week’s “Our Towns”: A Special Letter from Dublin & A Guide to New England Black-Owned Businesses

Focus on All Things New England Having trouble viewing this email? [View this email on the web](. JUNE 6, 2020 Dear Readers, When the “Our Towns” newsletter launched more than two months ago, it was in response to a national crisis in which people could best care for themselves and others by hunkering down at home. But the events of the past week have illuminated another national crisis, one that urgently demands that people care for each other by speaking up. So, this week we are putting our “comfort” reads on hold — travel stories, recipes, wish-you-were-here photos — in favor of sharing ideas and resources that we hope will help bring together our towns, and all towns. Letter from Dublin A special dispatch from longtime Yankee editor Mel Allen. June 6, 2020 — It feels different this time. What is happening around us will not recede with the next news cycle or the day’s spin. We sense our country is at a turning point, and which way it will turn we do not yet know. So we are holding our breath. Waiting. A mix of anger, fear, determination, and hope fills the air, like a humidity that clings to us wherever we live. Right now, early Thursday morning, June 4, the birdsong comes in so loudly through my open windows it is as though I have speakers outside. The sky is blue, the river quiet, and with the day expected to reach the 80s, it feels as if summer has stopped teasing and is ready to settle in. It smells like summer now, lilacs everywhere, and roses starting to wrap around our trestle. The trees along the river have never looked so green. I bought a new lawnmower and the freshly cut grass inspires Rudy to roll on his back, his legs pawing the air in what can only be joy, and I envy his delight. I live on the main road to Concord, and the traffic, especially trucks, has picked up as businesses begin to reopen all around the state. And if I lived without any news, in a quiet insular world of my own, it might seem that life as we knew it before the pandemic was finding its footing again. But the news floods in, more than most of us can absorb. A friend told me the other day he was struggling to focus on what he had to do. I knew what he meant. I imagine the exception will be anyone who is not torn apart and searching for words and actions that make sense. Hundreds of protesters — including 3-year-old Idris, whose sign reads “Black Lives Matter, I Matter” — gathered last Saturday in Peterborough and Dublin, New Hampshire. | Photo by [Ben Conant/Monadnock Ledger-Transcript]( I do not know as I write this what today will bring. Or tomorrow. Events beyond this pocket of mountains and forest and lakes and villages where I live feel both distant and close at the same time. When the virus overwhelmed cities only a few hours away, we felt its approach. We followed the numbers. Just two weeks ago our conversations seemed to be about one thing: the pandemic. Would this state and the rest of New England reopen in time for summer? Could tourism survive without summer travelers pouring in? If not, the region’s resiliency would be tested as it has not been in our lifetime. That is what we read and talked about. Then Memorial Day came and changed what we talked about, what we thought about. That morning, a black man named Christian Cooper who was strolling, birdwatching, in Central Park asked a white woman to please obey the signs and leash her dog. As she threatened instead to call police and claim she was in danger from “an African-American man,” he calmly recorded the interaction. Soon after, his sister posted the video, and the shock of what people saw and heard sped around the world. Viewers reacted with anger, shame, and the recognition that this is what black men understand can happen to them anywhere, anytime. Later that evening, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed in Minneapolis by a police officer named Derek Chauvin. We not only know that he died, we also witnessed how he died, because a 17-year-old held up her phone and recorded one man taking the life of another. George Floyd’s gasps of “I can’t breathe” now echoes in our history. The cruelty and barbarity of the knee against his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — even as, suffocating, he called for his mother — has shaken this country, an emotional earthquake with aftershocks that repeat day and night. In the news coverage, what we see most often are scenes of destruction and chaos; we have seen those scenes before, and as always the violence of a minority of protestors as well as of police threatens to steal the profound reality of a country stopping in its tracks, saying, This is another virus to kill. At noon last Saturday a few hundred people, with the blessing of local police, gathered on both shoulders of Route 101 in Peterborough. They stood together, beginning at the main traffic light, a few feet apart, most wearing masks, hoisting signs: Black Lives Matter, Heartbroken, Remember George Floyd. Children stood beside adults, and they lined the roadside flowing west for a few hundred yards. Seven miles away in Dublin, the scene repeated, all ages standing along both shoulders of the road, faces masked, signs held aloft. It was not a protest march to make national news. But in that shared hour, neighbors said to neighbors, We can’t be quiet. No matter where we live, we have to play a part. I have a friend who lives an ocean away, and when I told him about the outpouring of shared feelings in these small towns, he asked how that could make a difference, especially since so few people of color live here. I understood the question. New England is one of the whitest regions in the country. Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire are three of the four whitest states in America. Except for a few urban pockets — Portland and Lewiston in Maine, Burlington in Vermont, and Manchester in New Hampshire — many residents here in northern New England will live their whole lives without working beside someone who is not white, someone who has lived the bitter truth and consequence of racism. Within this bubble, it can be easy to draw a curtain against a reality far from one’s own. I am the editor of a magazine whose very name lends itself to a stereotype: The word “Yankee” conjures up the face of the Maine fisherman, the Vermont farmer, the wilderness logger, the maple syrup maker, the flinty citizen at town meeting, all of whom are likely white. This has been one of the challenges I have not yet succeeded in meeting. People have always read Yankee in part because they find comfort in it. The world is so complex, so often unsettling, and we give them beautiful images of lakes and coasts, fall foliage and snow-capped mountains, lobster shacks by the rocky shore, winding country roads. People have told me they feel their blood pressure being lowered as they read; they look elsewhere for commentary on social and political crises. Even when we write about complex issues facing the region — whether rising seas, or intrusive pipelines, or opioids, or asylum seekers putting down roots in an old mill town — Yankee remains in the minds of many the magazine of a New England that is always lovely, always inviting. But there is both an old story and a new one being told right now. Old to black people, new to anyone to whom “Black Lives Matter” felt abstract, belonging somewhere not here. There were other victims of police violence in just the few weeks before George Floyd died, and their names, too, are spoken at protest rallies, but the unbearable intimacy of watching what happened to this man made it about here, wherever here may be. The curtains can’t be closed again, no matter what business we are in. So I think about the question from my friend overseas. Do a few hundred people on a New Hampshire roadside move even a pebble’s worth of the mountains of pain and hurt felt by people of color? Probably not. But there are hundreds of these gatherings now, and within them moments that provide both inspiration and hope. Scores of people, so many of them young, lying face down on roadways and in parks, their arms clasped behind their backs, in total silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. White people standing, kneeling, marching, yelling, crying alongside black. In Connecticut, a state trooper holding hands with a black protestor. Police everywhere being photographed kneeling beside protestors, police chiefs across the country saying, This is how change will happen. There will be no turning back. A native of Keene, New Hampshire, Jonathan Daniels was an Episcopal seminarian who was killed in Alabama in 1965 while protecting a fellow civil rights worker, 17-year-old Ruby Sales. | Photos courtesy of the Virginia Military Institute Archives My son Dan once attended an elementary school in Keene, New Hampshire, named for Jonathan Daniels, who had grown up in that small city. Daniels was a seminarian at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he joined many others to fight for civil rights in the deep South. He was 26 years old, when, in a small Alabama town, he tried to enter a store with two black teenagers to buy them a soda. A local deputy sheriff aimed his shotgun at one of them, Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed her to safety as the gun went off, killing him instantly. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.” Ruby Sales, who is now in her 70s, went on to found the Spirit House Project in honor of the man who saved her life. The project has documented more than 2,000 state-sanctioned deaths against black men and women, nearly all of whom were unarmed. She has dedicated her life to his death, and her work now ripples through the Black Lives Matter movement. How many pebbles did Jonathan Daniels move before he was killed? How many does Ruby Sales continue as she keeps on with her own mission? It feels different this time. If this is not a crossroads for America, then I do not know what that might look like. The irony is not lost that George Floyd lost his life on Memorial Day, a day when services honoring the men and women killed in wars end always in prayer and always, always with the words: We will never forget. Guide to New England Black-Owned Businesses We support the efforts of those working to bring about change and racial equality and justice in New England and across America. For those looking to help, we’ve put together a [Guide to New England Black-Owned Businesses]( that also includes a list of local and national organizations that you can support. Please let us know of any we missed. Until Next Week… Amid these days of upheaval, we hope you’ve found some connection and community in “Our Towns.” We’ll be back next week with another care package of news and notes, so until then— Take heart, be well, and stay in touch. Your friends at Yankee [Unsubscribe]( [Forward to a Friend]( [Send Feedback]( [Facebook](   [Instagram](    [Pinterest](    [Twitter](   Help us be sure that this email newsletter gets to your inbox. Adding our return address [Today@NewEngland.com]( to your address book may "whitelist" us with your filter, helping future email newsletters get to your inbox. 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